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Thursday, 23 December 2010

Denisovans

Today’s newspapers carry news, based on a report in the science journal Nature, of DNA findings relating to an archaic group of humans, some of whose fossilized remains have been found in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia. (Here’s the Guardian’s version. There’s also an informative article on the “Denisova hominin” in Wikipedia.)

The new human ancestors were named Denisovans after the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains where their remains were found.

The matter was duly reported on BBC R4 in this morning’s Today programme.

But how do we pronounce Denisova and its derivative Denisovan? In particular, where does the stress go? The BBC reporter stressed the second syllable, -ˈnɪs-.

The name of the cave is of course Russian, and is written in Cyrillic as Денисова. It is the feminine of Денисов Denisov, from the name Денис Denis. But the stressing of Russian patronymics ending in -ов (-ov) is notoriously unpredictable.

None of the pronunciation dictionaries I have to hand record the name. But the online resource Forvo does!

(Forvo is a website with sound files demonstrating the pronunciation of a claimed 800-thousand-odd words in 267 languages. Anyone can upload a sound file showing how they pronounce a given name or word.)

A speaker described only as “Female from Russia” pronounces Денисов clearly as dʲɪˈnʲisəf. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Assuming that this is the regular Russian pronunciation, it follows that Денисова Denisova is dʲɪˈnʲisəvə and that we should anglicize it as dəˈnɪsəvə (or perhaps with dɪ- or de-, or indeed with -ˈniːs-). The hominins, then, are dəˈnɪsəvənz.

This was indeed the pronunciation used by the BBC presenter. Well done the BBC Pronunciation Unit._ _ _

My wife Elena speaks with an old-fashioned Leningrad accent much admired by cultivated Muscovites. (Well, by some of them). I asked her to read the start of an Russian Tourism feature on the Denisova Cave. She didn't know until afterwards that the purpose was to record her pronunciation of Денисова.

It's not the feminine forms that are the problem — not usually, at least. The problem is knowing where to place the stress on the masculine names in -ов.

Elena tells me that the Russian equivalent of Smith, Jones and Robinson is Ivanov, Petrov, Siderov — iva⁠ˈnof, pʲɪ⁠ˈtrof, ˈsidərəf— with stress on different syllables. The trio does exemplify a rule of thumb that two-syllable names tend to have stress on final ов. There are obvious exceptions like Pavlov/Pavlova — ˈpavlof ⁠/⁠ ˈpavləvə — but not too many.

Perhaps this tendency extends to final stress in names without ov. This might possibly explain the shift of stress to the final syllable of Tolstoy — despite a derivation from the word meaning fat.

The converse is about as good as a rule of thumb. With exceptions such as Kuznetsov, names with more than two syllables tend not to have the stress on ов.

Edinburgh University recently opened a Russian-funded centre named after a Princess Dashkova. An important figure in her day, the Royal lady was not spoken of in Soviet times, and not even the native speakers knew how her name was pronounced. Relying on the rule of thumb above, they made Dashkova rhyme with flash rover — until somebody discovered ˈdaʃkəvə in an encyclopaedia. The princess's greatest achievement, as Elena sees it, was to put two dots on the letter е to distinguish /e/ — е from /jo/ — ё

Lena did mention a chap who pretentiously —in her judgement — shifted the stress to Ivánov. However, he was a painter. She recognises your Ivánov, though. He was Vyacheslav Ivanovich. The painter she had in mind was Alexander Andreievich. Googling revealed a near contemporary, Sergei Vasilievich Ivanóv, more down to earth in his subject matter and his name stress.

It occurs to me that if as Lena says Ivanov, Petrov, Siderov is the Russian equivalent of Smith, Jones and Robinson, then a Russian calling himself Ivánov is not unlike an Englishman calling himself Robínson.